Brewologist: Either gose beer is worth its salt

Mar. 20, 2013

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CentralOhio.com

Reader reviews

So many beers, and I have so little time — but you can help. If you have sampled a brew you’d like to tell the world about — at least, the part of the world reached by this column — send me a few paragraphs. Here’s how: • Email sgoble@gannett.com• Tweet me on Twitter. I’m @Brewologist. • I’m on Facebook, too: www.facebook.com/pages/Brewologist. I’ll save the mini-reviews you send me, and pass them along in the weekly columns. Until next week, prost!

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One of the best things about the cutthroat competition among U.S. craft brewers is the endless need to invent.

Brewing beer is a booming business, and brewers constantly bring out original products to catch the attention of a drinking public that has learned beer goes far beyond lager. You find Dogfish Head Craft Brewery exploring hybrids of beer and wine, Buckeye Brewing Co. incorporating pawpaws into ale, Magic Hat Brewing Co. going wild with dandelions and spruce. We get endless variety and innovation, all aimed at winning your attention and beer money.

Sometimes, though, brewers get great results not through innovation, but through resurrection and revival. Beer styles once popular in some part of the world, that vanished in the march of time and the so-called progress of brewery mergers, can be rediscovered and delight new fans.

Consider, for example, gose — a mostly wheat ale brewed with sea salt and coriander. Such ales were considered a regional specialty in Leipzig, Germany, in the 1800s. Brewers produced a spontaneously fermented ale using wheat malts and salty water, although they sometimes added salt themselves.

Times changed and gose sort of fell by the wayside, even vanishing for a few years during World War II, until it was revived by one of the few Leipzig brewers who knew how to make it.

Gose disappeared again in the 1960s, and was given another chance in the 1980s by Lothar Goldhahn, who was reviving a German pub and figured he’d revive a beer style, too.

Other German brewers soon joined the fun, and today some U.S. craft brewers are brewing with salt, too. Spontaneous fermentation with wild yeast is no longer the norm, but brewers have figured out how to get the beer’s character right with their own domesticated yeast strains.

I learned all these things after a bottle of Saint Saltan, a gose brewed by Magic Hat Brewing Co. in Vermont, came my way.

Until then, I had never tried a gose, or even heard of one.

I did a bit of Googling and learned other U.S. brewers were making gose, too, so I grabbed some Verloren from Samuel Adams, aka the Boston Beer Co. Naturally, I decided a head-to-head tasting was in order.

The idea of a salt-infused beer intrigued me from the start. If you’ve ever enjoyed a handful of nuts followed by a swig of cold brew, you probably understand the appeal, too.

I started with Magic Hat’s Saint Saltan. It is a cloudy, pale gold with a nice white head. The scent was mostly wheat beer malts, a bit tart, with no real hops presence and nothing that seemed salty.

I took a sip, and the first impression was a tangy wheat beer flavor. The body was decent, not at all heavy, but not too thin, and the taste was refreshing.

At this point, I was thinking, “Good, but not spectacular. A solid wheat ale.”

Then, of course, the saltiness arrived in the aftertaste.

“Not bad,” I thought, taking another sip.

Very shortly thereafter, I was wishing I had another bottle. Here was a light and tangy brew, only 4.6 percent alcohol by volume, pulling off the unlikely trick of being refreshing and salty simultaneously. I’m sure this was not an easy effect to achieve.

I got to the bottom of the glass in short order, and took heart in knowing I had a Sam Adams gose in the refrigerator. I opened that one the next night.

The first thing I noted was the Verloren pours a wee bit darker, with a bit more head. The aroma seems pretty close to that of Saint Saltan, mostly wheat beer without a hops vibe, but there was more of a coriander note in the scent.

The Sam Adams gose has a richer flavor and a bit more body, and a decidedly stronger kick from the coriander. It has a stronger alcohol kick, too, at 6 percent alcohol by volume. It has slightly more bitterness presence from its Saaz hops than Magic Hat gets from its Hallertau, although neither beer can really be considered bitter. The saltiness of Verloren is more upfront, right there in the malts rather than hitting you at the finishing line. I didn’t get as much coriander from Magic Hat as I did from Sam Adams.

In essence, I found Verloren to be a slightly bigger, richer version of Saint Saltan — and decided I like Saint Saltan better.

Longtime readers are scratching their heads at this point, knowing I generally prefer bigger and bolder beers. Frankly, I am a bit surprised myself, but here’s the thing: In the end, Verloren reminded me of a nice variation on other beers. Coriander is not an uncommon ingredient, and I’ve had a number of Belgian and German brews that have flavor profiles similar to Verloren’s. The salty vibe is nice, but it is submerged in other, more familiar beer flavors, in the Sam Adams brew.

In Saint Saltan, the salt gets a chance to shine on its own — and that, to me, is the vital difference. I’ll happily drink more of either beer, but if I have a choice I’ll tip the Magic Hat.

Beer fans at BeerAdvocate.com give a slight nod to Sam. Readers gave Verloren 80 points in 236 rankings and Saint Saltan 74 in 23 ratings. (This difference in sample size tells me more people should get acquainted with Magic Hat beer.) The people who run the website scored it a dead heat, 79 to 78 in favor of Saint Saltan; I’d make that gap a tad wider, but concede it is a close call.

I often prefer beers at cellar temperature rather than ice cold, but cold is good with gose. I think I’d like this brew best with tortilla chips and guacamole, or perhaps a sour cream and chive dip — something cool and fresh as a counterpoint to the slightly salty brew.

I also think I’ll try to nab some more gose to have on hand when the Reds open their baseball season. If you’re interested in gose, don’t wait. Both of these salty dogs are spring seasonals, and might not be around long.